I didn’t always shut her up at night, and when I emerged from the bedroom after nights during which I had left her loose in the flat she would be sitting in the semi-darkness on her favourite night perch – the top of the half-open bathroom door. When I went in and turned on the light she jumped over to the shower rail, then to the top of the wall cabinet, where she sat bobbing and weaving, and pecking absent-mindedly at my hand when I rummaged blindly for the shaving soap. When I had washed my neck and started lathering it, she hopped to my shoulder without prompting and turned to face the mirror. She never made the classic animal’s response to a mirror – trying to find the other owl behind it – which was intriguing, because she had only ever caught the briefest glimpses of other owls when she had been a hatchling and during her couple of days at Water Farm. For an animal to recognize itself in a mirror argues a degree of self-consciousness, which is generally considered to be a sign of high intelligence. Sometimes she started clicking her beak through the side of my hair and beard, making a quiet machine-gunning sound.
When I got into the shower after completing my shave she seldom showed any interest, for which I was grateful. On the first couple of mornings she had sat on the shower rail and watched me beadily, making me wonder uneasily whether she might try to explore me more directly when I turned the water off. For some reason, it was on occasions when I had no clothes on that my eyes were most drawn to her talons.
* * *
She normally wandered off when I turned the shower on; but every day without fail, soon after the water noise stopped – and usually while I was sitting on the side of the bath, towelling my feet – I would hear a questioning croon, and her face appeared again, wide-eyed with interest, around the bottom of the bathroom door. For some unknown reason she had decided that this was the perfect opportunity to get her head preened.
She advanced across the floor in two or three great leaps, with half-open wings fanning slowly, until the last jump carried her up to my knee. Then she would shuffle closer along my thigh until she was beneath my chin, arrange herself neatly, give another croon or two, and lift her face towards mine with beak half open.
When I gave in and bent lower to nuzzle her head, she flicked the nictating membranes – the inner ‘second eyelids’ – across her eyes while she twisted and rubbed her head against the gentle pressure. Steadily, she sank further down on her undercarriage and fluffed out her body feathers, retracting her head into her ‘shawl’ until she looked rather like a single fluffy ball with a set of features on its top surface. Her feathers smelt clean, warm, woolly, and sort of … biscuity. If I stopped nuzzling she squeaked insistently, and she seemed to enjoy it most when I rubbed the close triangle of short feathers immediately above her beak and between her eyes. After a few moments of this she would start twisting her head again, presumably bringing new itchy areas into contact – often, the feathered flaps of the big ear-trenches hidden behind the edges of her facial disc.
When I finally got fed up with the crick in my spine and convinced her that the session was over, Mumble would shake herself vigorously, and jump up to my shoulder to look around brightly for new amusements. This was my permission to move.
* * *
Mumble’s usual evening-patrol routine involved short flights from chair backs to door tops, to her tray-perch, then down to the living-room floor to walk along the foot of the window-wall, then up to a bookshelf, then out into the darkened hallway to fly to the telephone table, then back to my chair. She occasionally took a short stroll on a glass-topped bookshelf, clicking along with a gingerly gait as if walking on ice. Infrequently, a hollow echo of this same ‘gunfighter with spurs’ sound betrayed the fact that she had flown down into the empty bath and was stomping up and down there – perhaps in search of anything intriguing that might have crawled up through the plughole.
When I wasn’t watching her, there might be a sudden crash as she leapt from some perch straight down on to the plastic sheet covering the sofa. She would give it three or four quick, killing kicks, then move around on the unstable surface of the cushions with wings nearly spread and ‘mantled’ downwards and forwards, in the pose that raptors adopt to cover and defend a kill. Then, satisfied with her victory, she would fly up to one of her perches and fluff her feathers, flick her wings back neatly like coat-tails, and give a final little shuffle before settling down and tucking one foot ‘in her pocket’.
I never tired of watching her floor-walking, largely because she found it so interesting herself. Before she jumped down there from a perch she considered the drop zone carefully, head on one side, as if making calculations before she committed herself to a plan. Once down, she would stroll across to sit at the foot of the window-wall in her ‘cottage loaf’ pose – bum planted squarely on the carpet, legs retracted so that only the tips of her talons showed under her skirts – and gaze around alertly with wide eyes. Often she seemed to spot some invisible real or imaginary prey a few inches in front of her toes – which was odd, because I knew that her short-range vision was bad. Nevertheless, she would stare fixedly at one spot on the carpet before jumping up to full leg stretch, pouncing with murderous violence and ‘killing’ it. She might repeat this game for a full minute at a time.
If something outside the window-wall caught her attention she sprang into movement, extending her legs like a chicken standing up and making a bobbing run along beside the dark glass, balancing herself with wings billowing half open like a pantomime villain’s cloak. This ‘sinister stalking’ effect – reminiscent of the cartoon cat Sylvester trying to sneak up on the canary Tweetypie – was particularly amusing when I saw her dashing from behind one bit of cover to another, stopping, then making the next short rush. Naturally, she liked tunnelling into dark corners under low bits of furniture, but also stomping around boisterously underneath things that had a taller clearance. Predictably, the newspapers on various parts of the floor would often suffer catastrophically under her joyous attacks.
* * *
I did try giving her a ping-pong ball to play with, but after kicking it around listlessly a couple of times she completely lost interest. Since she couldn’t get a claw into its hard surface, she didn’t seem to think it was worth chasing – crumpled-up balls of newspaper were much more fun. She was also delighted with a gift from one of my friends: a light, soft plush ball of the kind that mums hang from the top of prams and cots. She killed this within seconds, bore it up to her door top (with some balance difficulties during the flight – it was nearly the size of a tennis ball) and proceeded to disembowel it, expertly. Within fifteen minutes the floor was littered far and wide with its stuffing of synthetic fluff. I didn’t want her to swallow any of this dubious stuff, which was no doubt made from some petrochemical by-product, and it was clear that if I got her any more of these toys they wouldn’t last more than minutes, so I didn’t repeat that particular treat.
For some unfathomable reason, she seemed to be fascinated by my feet. If she was down on the floor she stalked them silently when I walked past, making me nervous that I might step on her. When she was up on her door top she often watched them moving past below her with intent focus, calculating their range, course and speed before curling her talons over the edge of her perch, dropping her head between them to keep her eyes centred on the target, and then launching herself unerringly.
I soon began to wonder if the real objective of these attacks was my shoelaces, which seemed to be a constant temptation. Sometimes she would stroll innocently across the living-room floor to sit on the carpet beside my chair, her quiet little head apparently watching the TV screen, but before long I would feel the tap of her landing on one of my crossed feet. Settling herself firmly, she bowed her head and began nibbling and tugging at my laces. Her sharp, hooked bill was shockingly destructive, and when I could no longer be bothered to keep shooing her off she was capable in minutes of reducing a piece of woven lace to a drift of separated, broken threads on the carpet below my feet. I soon had to repl
ace all my laces with leather thongs; the discarded worm-corpses of the woven ones, discovered in wastepaper baskets, were among her favourite playthings.
* * *
Diary: 11 August 1978 (c. 3.5 months old)
Tonight was a first – it seems trivial, but it’s yet another pleasing contrast to my experience with Wellington. Normally, when I go into the balcony cage to fetch her indoors after coming home in the evening, I wait for her to go through her routine of ‘whooping’ in the corner of her hutch before emerging, and then sitting on her doorstep perch for a couple of minutes while she gets herself organized. Meanwhile, I stand with the cardboard box under my left arm, open end towards her. When she seems to be settled, I reach out and slide my right hand up behind her legs so that she steps backwards on to it; then I guide hand and owl together into the box, simultaneously swivelling it round against my chest to leave only a narrow crack from which to extract my hand. I then try to get back indoors before her frustration provokes painful efforts to dig her way out through my chest. This may be accompanied by chittering, and a furious, whiskery little face trying to squeeze its way into view around the edge of the box.
Tonight, as I stood waiting for her to finish blinking, yawning, stretching, crapping, shaking her feathers and generally going through her waking-up routine, she looked at the box calmly, measured the distance and jumped right into it. Then she turned round so that she would be facing the right way ‘when the lift door opened’, and stayed still and quiet while I went through the performance of extracting us both through the Double-Reciprocating Owl Valve and into the living room.
* * *
Her vocabulary is continuing to expand rapidly. Her range of sounds still includes the original cheeps, croons and squeaks, the more recent creaking whistles, and the habitual, tremulous Indian whoops that are always directed into some enclosed place. Beak-clacking is a sign of annoyance, but apparently it’s not always aimed at other people. She also does it sometimes when simply waking from a doze, alternating short bursts of clacking with sneezes. The first time I managed to watch her closely while she did it I discovered that she wasn’t actually snapping her beak open and shut at all – the beak stays half open. I suspect she must be snapping her tongue from its resting place pressed into the floor of her beak, and the noise is the ‘clop’ of broken suction – just like the sound that we can make with our tongue and palate. (So she’s not doing anything so crude as banging her mandibles together – she’s actually speaking Xhosa.)
Most notably, she now has a proper five-part hoot: ‘Hooo! … (three to five seconds’ pause)… hoo, hoo-hoo HOOO!’, in a descending tremolo. [I have since read that a bird species’ characteristic call or song is partly a genetic inheritance and partly learned by imitation, so Mumble must to some degree have copied her hooting from wild owls that she could hear calling in the distance, though I couldn’t.] She also has a sharply bitten-off ‘kee-wikk!’, which sounds to my vulgar human ears like a rude Anglo-Saxon expletive. I heard her doing several of these in her night cage recently, about thirty minutes after lights out. Sometimes she also joins briefly in the dawn chorus at about 5am – just half a dozen hoots, then silence.
* * *
From our first days together, Mumble’s method of launching herself from the top edge of the living-room door when I walked past was always impressive. Without stretching from her ball-of-fluff pose, she would simply lean forwards and roll confidently off into space, hardly opening her wings as she dropped to my shoulder, and landing with a little squeak. Given my own brief and painfully incompetent flirtation with parachuting a couple of years previously, I was deeply envious of both her equipment and her technique. Naturally, as the weeks passed I sought every opportunity to watch her practising her flying. This learning process took time, and since she lacked the luxury of an instructor with dual controls to keep her out of trouble until she was ready to go solo, the weeks while she still had her L-plates up were not without incident.
Take-offs and point-to-point flights came easily. From a solid perch, she sprang into the air by the power of her flexed legs, gave one downstroke of her spreading wings, and immediately achieved flying speed. The large size of her wings compared to her weight gave her a light wing-loading, and thus effortlessly buoyant flight. (Owls have only about one-third the wing-loading of, say, a duck, which has to flap its wings frantically while charging down a long runway for take-off.) When she was accelerating, her individual wing movements were too fast for my eyes to isolate, but stop-frame photography of tawnies has shown me that the long, finger-like primary feathers at the wingtips curl forwards at the ends of the up- and down-strokes, making crescent patterns in the air. The broad, yard-long spread of her wings made her body look like a small, perfectly horizontal nacelle, with her head streamlined face-forwards into the shape of it by her ruff of neck feathers. Her tail was furled into a single spike when she first took off, but then spread out into a rounded fan. Her undercarriage was retracted, with lower legs bent up parallel to her belly, feet almost invisible against the feathers and claws neatly folded in under her toes.
Nevertheless, despite Mumble’s elegant mastery of most phases of flight by her first autumn, it was a while longer before her landings reliably improved beyond the frankly lamentable. She was fine when she flew up to a perch at an angle from below, but controlling any kind of downward swoop seemed beyond her. The problem was clearly the difficulty of co-ordinating the transition from horizontal to vertical movement (exactly like a novice RAF pilot mastering the tricky technique of landing a vectored-thrust Hawker Harrier ‘jump jet’). Until she got the hang of this, she usually flew full tilt at the objective – her tray-perch, the back of a chair, a table lamp – and smashed into it, sometimes rocking it with the impact and giving a little winded squeak.
Her incompetence was most obvious when she forgot (as she often did) her previous experiences of ‘ice landings’ on the long marble coffee table. She made her final approach far too fast and at far too shallow an angle, and when she touched down she simply skidded across it with her feet flailing vainly for traction, her wings beating wildly, and her tail fanning out awkwardly in all directions. Invariably she would disappear off the far side in an ungainly cartwheel of feathers, like some broken ornithopter in a jerky early-1900s newsreel.
One day she added a refinement to this routine, attempting a lengthways landing while a roll of paper towels was lying on the near end of the flight deck. Apparently expecting this to be solidly fixed, she smacked straight into it, talons first. Naturally, under the impact of about a pound of fast-moving owl it began to roll along the table, unreeling as it went. Mumble found herself frantically flapping and back-pedalling on top of it, riding the ever-diminishing cylinder like a lumberjack on a rolling log until both of them fell off the end of the table. She seemed to find my helpless laughter irritating (one can take umbrage so much more convincingly when one has a lot of feathers).
* * *
In time, of course, she mastered the landings too, learning by trial and error to pick the moment to ‘flare’ her wings. As she approached the selected landing spot her body began to swing down from the horizontal towards the vertical, rotating around the axis of her shoulder joints. Simultaneously, she began to bend her wings up at the ‘elbows and wrists’ into shallow L-shapes, and to flare them – tilting the leading edges upwards to increase the angle of the ‘aerofoil’. Meanwhile, her tail spread downwards in a near-vertical fan. The tilting slowed the airflow over the top surface of her wings and so reduced the lift beneath them, while the presentation of the underwing surfaces and tail-fan acted as air brakes, cutting her forward speed. At this point, as the airflow above the wing broke up, an aircraft might stall and fall out of the sky; but at the critical moment Mumble extended the alula feathers part way along the leading edge of her wings, which both sped up the airflow and increased the wing area – the principle behind the leading-edge slats that airline passengers see and hear thumping out during
final approach.
Meanwhile, she had been extending her legs and swinging them forwards in front of her near-vertical belly, spreading the taloned toes to give a wide reach. Lift was killed at the moment of touchdown, but not always forward speed – usually she sank down as surely as a helicopter, but if she was excited she still made a fighter pilot’s fast, flashy combat landing. Either way, the first part of her to make contact with a perch was the tough, nubbly soles of her feet, at which point the talons instantly snapped closed to grip.
For a pick-up of prey rather than a landing, she glided in on horizontal wings with her legs extended. She kept her speed down but did not kill all the lift, bringing her feet forwards at the last second to make her hit, before another wingbeat lifted her away again. (When an owl is hunting in near-total darkness, and so relying completely upon its ears rather than its eyes, it cannot make its usual confident pounce straight on to its target. Alerted to the prey’s general location by hearing a first sound, it points its head in that direction and glides along that bearing with legs dangling. It needs a second sound to confirm the exact distance to the target; then it throws its head back, flares its wings, spreads its talons and strikes.)
* * *
One thing that I had not expected was the discovery that Mumble sometimes used her spread, lowered wings to support some of her weight when grounded. I first noticed this when she was playing boisterous hunting games on the plastic-covered sofa, but a more dramatic example was an attempt one evening to land on a four-string set of clotheslines stretched above my bath. Attracted by furious squeaking, I found her trying to deal with the trampoline effect caused by the sudden arrival of her weight on the separate stretchy cords. She was bouncing around, gripping two of the strings with her feet and trying not to do the splits as her weight pushed them apart. Wobbling and lurching, she extended her wings out and down in the ‘mantling’ pose like a spread cloak, resting them on the cords to stabilize her balance. (The spectacle reminded me of a David Attenborough natural history programme on TV, featuring a primitive Venezuelan bird that retains a vestigial claw on the alula in the leading edge of the wing – a survival from the reptilian past, which the young bird uses to help it clamber around the treetop nest.) This confident use of her wings as general-purpose limbs surprised me; I had expected her to be completely protective of them.
The Owl Who Liked Sitting on Caesar Page 7